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Do Genius actually own lyrics?
It does, at the least, suggest Google is paying someone who less than ethically sources their data though.
I hope Google delists them so they go fuck themselves. azlyrics is SO MUCH better. I'd rather see them at the top instead of Genius.
Do Genius actually own lyrics?
However, to be copyrightable as a derivative, work must contain sufficient new expression to satisfy copyright law's requirement of originality. So you can't copyright a photocopy of a book, for example.
Presumably Genius thinks their lyrics are analogous to the photograph, rather than the photocopy; they may not own the lyrics, but they own this particular transcription of the lyrics.
Ironic that genius scraped other lyrics sites to bootstrap their business. Cute analysis can’t hide the basic hypocrisy here.
I feel it's pretty typical for some of these companies who like to complain about other's unethical practices. Strongly reminds me of Crunchyroll.
They don’t really own the lyrics in any case. In traditional publishing you would have to pay the original artist to reproduce the lyrics, as you have to do for poems and other lyrical works.
They were forced to pay royalties, so should others incl Google.
Do Genius actually own lyrics?
Pretty sure that's the main reason Genius will have difficulty pursuing this case. Google isn't infringing their copyright, because they can't copyright someone else's work, and I doubt the unique pattern of apostrophes is enough of an infringement to claim Google stole, it merely proves the source of the content was them. It does, at the least, suggest Google is paying someone who less than ethically sources their d…
Copyrights, patents, and trademarks have clear limits. An overly expansive theory of copyright would be stifling to innovation and free expression.
It was sourced from someone who was liberal about taking legal risks, but I have a hard time seeing what ethical rights were broken. Indeed, the opposite theory is that if we don't exercise out rights, they go away and Google's source is risking litigation to preserve our rights.
The rightsholder here are the artists and their proxies (publishers and agents), not Genius. I wouldn't feel bad of they asked for a takedown or royalties.
> Starting around 2016, Genius said, the company made a subtle change to some of the songs on its website, alternating the lyrics’ apostrophes between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song. > When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words “Red Handed.” Clever. Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…
In the source code, in comments I'd put in a varying number of spaces to spell out a copyright phrase; that way, if some comments were removed, it would mostly still be present. It was later used to defend a case of stolen code from what I recall, though I had moved on from that company by then.
It wasn't as sophisticated as this, though; IIRC, mine was just a number of spaces to indicated basic symbols to spell out the phrase and nothing more. At the time, I was 19 years old, and hadn't been doing software dev for very long - young and naive, though that had its advantages back then.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel it's pretty typical for some of these companies who like to complain about other's unethical practices. Strongly reminds me of Crunchyroll.
What's wrong with crunchyroll? I thought they were legitimate?
I might be wrong, but IIRC, CR used to be a fan-sub type of site; I don't recall if they hosted stuff, or just linked to it. When I first found them, though, that's how they seemed to be. But since then, I think they license all of their content now or something like that. I may be totally wrong here, keep that in mind...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with crunchyroll? I thought they were legitimate?
NOTE: The following may not be correct... I might be wrong, but IIRC, CR used to be a fan-sub type of site; I don't recall if they hosted stuff, or just linked to it. When I first found them, though, that's how they seemed to be. But since then, I think they license all of their content now or something like that. I may be totally wrong here, keep that in mind...